Monday, December 18, 2006

Well we'd pretty much all guessed it wasn't going to be an Apple announcement as the weekend drew to a close and nobody has really heard anything that would have indicated that two years of waiting was finally at an end. It turns out that the iPhone trademark has been owned by Cisco since 1996 and today was the day they finally chose to release something under the brand name.

The main question that seems to be bothering people is what Apple is now going to call their phone. What phone? What hard evidence apart from a great deal of rumour and speculation do we actual have that Apple is planning to release a phone? It looks like this joke by Gizmodo has backfired quite badly for them, and for many it's the straw that breaks the camel's back. They don't care anymore, and you know what? I don't blame them...

Update: Scoble is claiming that the release of the iPhone by Linksys is a publicity coup for them, and a kick in the teeth for Apple. I'd argue quite the opposite, nobody cares about the Linksys product. The most common reaction was indifference, and then the inevitable question as to what Apple will call their cellphone now? I also don't think the iPhone's release strategy was a clever manipulation of the blogosphere, unless it was by Brian Lam on behalf of Gizmodo rather than by Linksys itself, don't look for conspiracy where the facts can equally well be explained by incompetence.

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.